Simone Weil

BBC Radio 4 in the series Great Lives with Matthew Parris: tomorrow, August 31st, at 4.30pm Eleanor Bron discusses the life of the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil. Available after the program and for quite a while.

Update: the programme discusses her work with Elanor Bron and Grahame Davis and the unlikelihood that she committed suicide. 

Prof Seth Schwartz: Columbia NT Seminar, September 15th at 7pm

Presentation: How Many Judaisms Were There?

Seth Schwartz, Jewish Theological Seminary

This paper is a critique of the idea of Judaismlessness, which shares with its predecessor -- the idea that there were "Judaisms" in antiquity -- the fact that it is rhetorically extreme shorthand for a set of ideas which, whether or not they prove to be valid, certain merit careful analysis. On one level, the correct response to Judaismlessness is straightforwardly empirical: Steve Mason may be battled effectively on his own positivistic turf. But Mason's argument, and Boyarin's appropriation of it, also raise fundamental issues about the entire project of writing about ancient Judaism (for lack of a better formulation), chief among which is in my analysis of the following: given that, strictly speaking, we can never eliminate anachronism and ethnocentrism (which amount to much the same thing) from the way we think about an "other," what then are we entitled to say about it? This may seem a rather strange and general concern to derive from a small body of scholarship about a small group (if that is what they were) of people who ostensibly lived long ago, but for various reasons, some of them a result of the character of the ancient sources and others of modern interests, the Jews provide an opportunity to address these issues in an especially focused way. One of the core critiques of "Judaism" is that the word apparently denotes a religion, a category whose applicability to antiquity, indeed perhaps to any period before the Enlightenment, is questionable, or at least debatable. I will argue for a pragmatic but highly cautious approach to the issue, while acknowledging the validity of the critique. 

Key readings:

S. Mason, "Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History," JSJ 38 (2007) 457-512.

D. Boyarin, "Rethinking Jewish Christianity: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which is Appended a Correction of my Border Lines)", JQR 99 (2009) 7-36.

Additional readings:

M. Satlow, "Defining Judaism: Accounting for 'Religions' in the Study of Religion", JAAR 74 (2006) 837-60.

T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 27-54.

C. Brumann, "Writing for Culture: Why a Successful Concept Should Not Be Discarded", Current Anthropology 40, Supplement, (1999) 1-13, with responses following, especially Lila Abu-Lughod and Ulf Hannerz.

B. Nongbri, "Dislodging 'Embedded' Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope", Numen 55 (2008) 440-60

S. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999, 109-39.

Will Barnet at Colby College and CMCA

Colby College has an exhibit on Will Barnet's New York Drawings and Prints and a current exhibit at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) includes prints by Will Barnet. Absolutely worth a visit.

The exhibit at CMCA, Will Barnet--Master Printmaker: Selected Prints from Five Decades, combines 14 widely known representational prints of family and personal memories with a series of very rare, less well-known abstract prints from the 1950s and '60s that appeared at the Lieber Museum on Long Island, New York, in 2009.

Together the exhibition offers a strong cross-section of Barnet’s interest in printmaking, which reaches back to his early days as a student at the Boston Museum School and continues when he was a student specifically chosen by his mentor, Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, beginning in 1931. Five years later, Barnet became the official printer for the Art Students League in New York, where he taught printmaking and painting for four decades. His own teaching -- there as well as at Cornell University, Cooper Union in New York City, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art -- influenced many famous American artists, including the late Bob Blackburn, an African American artist whose legendary fine art print shop got underway thanks to his mentor, Will Barnet.

In a new documentary by Dale Schierholt on Will Barnet, the artist explains that this image -- showing his wife and their child--separates the child from her mother, unlike traditional Madonna images. The strong lines, he says, are impressionistic. The documentary is very engaging and informative.

Summer Reading

Ah, the pleasures of summer reading...at present I am reading these novels: Gervase Phinn, Head Over Heels in the Dales (third volume in a series) suggested by my mother in light of my interest in teaching; Double Comfort Safari Club by Alexander McCall Smith (which author, btw, my mother heartily dislikes as she finds it unrealistic on the basis of her experience in Kenya); and Pat Barker, Double Vision: A Novel. I'm locating Tana French's Faithful Place through interlibrary loan.

For more serious reading, I'm reading a book on Galatians (see previous post) and Henry Plummer on the various uses of light in Shaker Architecture. Just reading the chapter headings is an education: Simplicity--Pristine Light; Order--Focused Light; Luminosity--Inner Light; Equality--Shared Light; Time--Cyclic Light. I've never thought of light in this way. The book's illustrations are illuminating.

On Friday I'm going to a booksigning of The Hidden Children of France edited by Danielle Bailly, translated by Betty Becker-Theye and just out From SUNY Press.

Is there anything more wonderful than a good book?

Excerpt from a recent sermon, "Martha's Table" preached at Ely Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford, the Right Rev. John Pritchard.

When I was at Canterbury with your Dean I was once taking the early morning eucharist and standing by at the end of the service to say goodbye. An American visitor came up to me and said, 'I haven't been to that service for 30 years.' I wasn't sure what to say, so I just said, 'Welcome home.' 'That's exactly it,' he said, and his eyes filled with tears. Something special happened to that man at that table that day.

With Jesus the ordinary table becomes the holy table, and your life and mine – ordinary lives – become holy lives. When we come to Communion we aren't coming to eat a piece of bread and drink a little wine. We're coming to be transformed, to be made a little more like Christ.

The offer – you might say – is still on the table.

I'm reading Brigitte Kahl's new book on Paul: Galatians Re-Imagined--Reading Paul with the eyes of the Vanquished.  Vernon K. Robbins reviews the book by saying:

This book is breathtaking not only in depth and scope but also in its goal with the reader. Kahl builds a complex, richly supported case that Paul’s argument for justification by faith and freedom from the law in Galatians is not properly interpreted through any mode of Christianity versus Judaism. Rather, Paul presents a Jewish-messianic monotheism that subverts and reconfigures the claims of imperial monotheism, which enacts an ideology of universal law and order.

He concludes: In its overall import, Kahl’s Galatians Re-imagined has an importance for the twenty-first century that writings such as F. C. Baur’s “The Christ-Party in the Corinthian Church,” D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined, W. Wrede’s The Messianic Secret in Mark, or K. Barth’s The Epistle of Romans had for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Hard to imagine a better review than that.

Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations ejournal (latest issue)

The latest issue of the ejournal (Vol.5 #1, 2010) of Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations published by the Center for Christian-Jewish Learning at Boston College is here.

Studying the New Testament (US Edition)

Studying the New Testament published with Bruce Chilton by Fortress Press is here! Thanks to the Fortress Press people particularly Ross Millar and Profs Davina Lopez, Sean Freyne and Richard Pervo for the endorsements. There are sample chapters here.

"Acts of God" courtesy of the New Yorker

Questions of agency, divine or otherwise, dog us these early-summer days, amid a pileup of ill tidings: an intractable war; hints, once again, of economic depression; the deep-sea oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Who’s to blame? Who’s in charge?

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/07/12/100712ta_talk_paumgarten#ixzz0tpRTDbFE

Pliny the Elder is the subject of In Our Time (this week).  Pliny the Elder is the author of  Natural History: A Selection (Penguin Classics). The programme information says that:
The Natural History contains information on zoology, astronomy, geography, minerals and mining and - unusually for a work of this period - a detailed treatise on the history of classical art. It's a fascinating snapshot of the state of human knowledge almost two millennia ago.
Pliny's 37-volume magnum opus is one of the most extensive works of classical scholarship to survive in its entirety, and was being consulted by scholars as late as the Renaissance. It had a significant influence on intellectual history, and has provided the template for every subsequent encyclopaedia.

Willis Barnstone's The Restored New Testament reviewed by Frank Kermode

The July 15th issue of the NY Review of Books has a review by Frank Kermode of Willis Barnstone's The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas which was published in 2009. Only part of it is available online. My problem is that I haven't read the original so I can't comment save to say that I will do so. When I have done so I will return to this post and make further comments. For now, I can say that while Kermode has much to say about Barnstone's translation theory ("the New Testament as we have it is a corrupt version of a lost original"), he has little to say about the translations of Thomas, Mary and Judas and the implications of their inclusion in the book. To be continued...